Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Simple guilty pleasures from the days of yore.

coke from a bottle with peanuts
home made divinity at Christmas
Sears wish book before Christmas
Christmas dinner with all the fixings
bacon, eggs and fried potatoes around the fire before sunup at deer camp.

Being able to go to deer camp with my dad, my grandpa and other older uncles and cousins. Smelling breakfast cooking and getting woke up and coming down stairs. My grandfathers brother was the cook and if anyone complained, they were the dishwasher. One time a cousin was handed a plate of eggs that were black with pepper. He made a comment about how much pepper were on the eggs, everyone looked at him and he quickly added he liked them just like that. The stories that were told during deer camp were repeated many times but it sure was great to listen and become part of the adults. My cousins used to bring special meats and cheeses that we only got once a year. Good times.

I still find the sound of crackling wood in an old slow combustion cooking stove relevant to creating a certain type of atmosphere.

one of best Christmas rural home lunch spreads I had was done on such, the device cooking the food also warming the cottage.
I would not have traded it for the fanciest 6 star hotel in the world.

Mostly being young, but I was not smart enough to know that at the time.

Mead is fermented fruit and honey, with added spices. It comes in a lot of various flavors depending upon what fruit and honey were used. (Clover honey is very different from buckwheat honey, or orange blossom honey, ect. )
It is a sweet white table wine or sorts, and a particular favorite of mine.
I had friends in college who made it, and they had a ten year waiting list for a single bottle.

A minor correction:

Mead is made purely with honey. I don't know about adding spices, though I suppose it's still mead

However add fruit to a mead before fermentation and you get a Melomel. Add grapes to ferment, and it's a Pyment. Pears and honey get you a Perry.

Fresh baked bread, slathered with butter. Dad told mom if she ever stopped baking bread, that was grounds for divorce!
Picking blueberries with the family and friends. Eating them with fresh cream.
Haying. I know a lot of people considered that hard work, but I still fondly remember the smell.
Hunting with dad, uncle, and cousins, and the smell of ruffed grouse and fired paper shotgun shells.
Fishing with my uncle. New guy (me, for several trips) was cook, until someone complained, then they became cook. The last morning of the last time out, I was frying eggs and dropped one. By the time I got done cleaning it up, the eggs were very well done. Uncle held one out horizontally, it barely sagged. His only comment was "Jeez! It's a good thing I like them this way."

Grouse . Grouse hunting was a wonderful thing. They are pretty much non existent now, here in NW Pa.

Perhaps I have found a new Vintner? might you have sample bottles ? You might have more than a few customers here on the Fire alone.
There are 4 commercial meads available here, none I actually like, and one of them is spiced. (German, iirc). There is one available by the glass that's not bad, but $10.00 a glass. That's a rare occasion item.
If you know how, and chose to use that skill, you could do well.....

Eggs for supper. Let me explain: Dad could not stand eggs in any form. Didn't even want us to eat them when he was around. Result of the smell of powdered eggs in the jungles of WW II. When Dad would work a double shift at DuPonts, Mom would break out the eggs and we'd have a feast. I miss them both so much.

Mom was absolutely forbidden from bringing Spam into the house. Dad ate so much of it in Europe during WWIi that he never wanted to see another can of it as long as he lived. Mom worked with a very meager budget for buying food, and always lamented the fact that she couldn't on occasion use a can of Spam, especially when all the venison and other wild game had been eaten up. June and July meals were very interesting
if we weren't catching a lot of fish. September brought the opening of squirrel season, and fresh meat for the table again.

My grandfather was the same way about soup and bread. Never ate 'em again.

Tagging along with my grandpa.

The smell of my Dad coming home after a hunt. He smelled equal parts, campfire, cigarettes, gunpowder, beer, and blood.

I read these and am reminded again how much my kids are missing by
not being poor country kids. Honestly, they are the kids I looked at with a mixture
of disdane and jealousy. I would have judged them rich and spoiled. (Even though the 16
year old girl is at work by choice, missing the football game) (bragging, sorry)


Home made bread, butter, and good homemade elderberry jelly. With fresh,
cold, unmolested milk.

Let's say a loaf, a full jar, and a quart.


Dang keto, I haven't had bread or jelly in 3 months.
And this ain't helping.

Dinners with my grandparents and extended family, deer hunts with my cousins, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, homemade biscuits, fresh corn and sweet tea my grandmother used to make. Fall leaf burning and cast iron cookware cleaning with my grandpa. All are gone now and I sure miss them.

So many memories.

I'll add one: Cooking jiffy pop popcorn over a campfire. The ones with the folded up tinfoil over the top of the disposable aluminum frypan. It would uncurl as it popped into a dome as you shook it. Then, when ready just slice it open to a most wonderful smell and the popcorn inside!

WWII rationing of butter and sugar. The people were told that it was so they could feed the troops but it was a political ploy to keep people in the war effort. Dad was in the navy and assigned to a sub chaser doing convoy escort duty out of Florida. He told me that they were sent to escort 2 barges loaded with butter and sugar 200 miles out to sea where the barges were then sunk. The butter and sugar were called 'surplus' while the rationing was in affect.

About that margarine...years ago I had an old beater of a camp trailer that we used for a storage shed for 10 years. I know it was 10 because of the license plates. I decided to clean it up and sell it. When I got to the ice box, I found a pound of margarine that I'd overlooked the last time I used the trailer. 10 years old and it hadn't molded, dried up, or anything. It was as good as when it came off the grocery store shelf. Anything that can last 10 years without deteriorating isn't food, it's plastic. I haven't knowingly eaten margarine since.